Why Enterprise IT Customers Are Stupid

There are many ways that buyers of Enterprise IT are stupid. Mostly its bad leadership and poor management that leads to poor decisions and processes like ITIL. Sometimes its pride preventing you from admitting failure, or the allure of a free steak lunch (putting one over your salary owner by paying for it with overpriced products).

Stupid also leads to incentives about having second rate staff. The dumber the team the more likely you are to be dumb when you compare yourself to peers. And why have a quality team when the purpose of IT is to “support” the real functions of the business like purchasing, accounting, warehouse and transport.

The misaligned incentives means that IT executives are not rewarded for good work. They are only recognised when there is no bad work (which is the enemy of good).

Can it be fixed ? Watch and find out.

About Greg Ferro

Human Infrastructure for Data Networks. 25 year survivor of Corporate IT in many verticals, tens of employers working on a wide range of networking solutions and products.

Host of the Packet Pushers Podcast on data networking at http://packetpushers.net- now the largest networking podcast on the Internet.

Comments

Greg, the actual ‘evolution’ of IT in the enterprise could be the crux. Most of my engagements are with folks who moved from pabx manager – fax/telex – telephone to IT manager role. These guys know what is the business but seriously lack technical understanding. On the other hand, another crowd of folks who knows how to code, understand technology but have no clue about why they are doing-how it’d affect the business. Thanks to it, big businesses still can sell million $ services, products and customization stuff.

The source of incompetence doesn’t matter much. As you say, PABX operators get promoted, the worst ‘engineers’ get promoted to get them off the equipment, people who want to be the boss (yes, those sort of people), the IT manager who really wants to be CEO and thinks that IT is the best path to the boardroom.

Too many of these people become managers and demonstrate incompetence which managing large budgets.

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